Mann, James Robert,1856–1922, American
legislator, b. McLean co., Ill. A Chicago lawyer, he held many local offices
before serving (1897–1922) as a Republican member of the U.S. House of
Representatives. He was (1910) one of the sponsors of the Mann-Elkins Act,
which strengthened railroad-rate regulation by the
Interstate
Commerce Commission, and he was author (1910), of the Mann Act, which
forbade, under heavy penalties, the transportation of women from one state to
another for immoral purposes. In the House, Mann introduced the Pure Food and
Drugs Act of 1906 and led the fight for an amendment to the Constitution
granting suffrage to women.

THE MANN ACT OF 1910

". . .In 1917 the provisions of the law {The Mann Act of 1910]
were further extended by the decision in the Caminetti v. United States to
include even non-commercial sex. . . The result of such decisions was to
change a law that had been designed to prevent white slavery to one designed
to enforce morals, even declaring private amorous pleasure trips that crossed
state lines to be illegal.

. . . The tendency of the U.S. Supreme Court for a time to include all
sexual activity under the categories prohibited by the Mann Act undoubtedly
reflected what was taking place in the United States. What had been intended
to be an abolition movement had become a prohibition movement, far from the
original intent of Mrs. {Josephine} Butler and her co-workers. The United
States advanced further toward prohibition than any other country. The attack
on illicit sex coincided with the movement to ban alcoholic beverages and just
as the temperance drive became a prohibition movement so did the move against
reglementation become prohibitionist.

. . .Even fornication was made a crime in many states. In 1920, for
example, some twenty states regarded habitual fornication a punishable act,
and in sixteen states a single act was enough to bring conviction. Such
widespread legal measures against all aspects of sexual activity, however,
made enforcement impossible. Most juries proved unwilling to convict for
illegal fornication; moreover, the Supreme Court soon recognized that
prostitutes had the same rights as other citizens and could be charged with or
convicted of only a specific offense. Thus, simply police suspicion that a
woman was a prostitute was not enough to have her arrested. Similarly,
attempts of municipalities to enact ordinances that prohibited men from
talking to suspected prostitutes on streets or sidewalks, or that states they
could not walk along the sidewalk with prostitutes. have been ruled
unconstitutional. As far as individual prostitutes were concerned, this meant
that conviction could only come through the activities of vice officers who
had to encourage a woman to solicit them to engage in sexual intercourse.

. . .the vice officer increasingly had to resort to dubious tactics to get
a prostitute to commit herself; in the process he often crossed the thin line
to entrapment.. . . Another difficulty with this kind of enforcement was that
it was open to wide-scale bribery. An officer could appear to be unaware of
prostitution taking place on his beat unless there was considerable public
pressure for him to respond, and not infrequently this looking the other way
by the police officer was something that could be and has been bought. "

"Prostitution: An Illustrated Social History "by
Vern and Bonnie Bullough/ Crown Books 1978

Chuck Berry was one
of the more high profile celebrities to be charged and convicted under the Mann
Act.